Users of streaming media content, such as movies, TV shows, podcasts, or music, are often interested in sharing at least part of the experience with other people. One currently available option for such a user is to attach the entire item of streamed content as a file attachment to an e-mail message that is sent to the desired recipients, optionally including one or more comments in the message. Other options include uploading a link to the entire item of content to a hosting service operated by a third party for later access by those recipients, or “ripping” the item of content into another streaming service accessible to those recipients. If the media content were a simple Word file, rather than streaming media, the user would have the option of attaching a Word Comment to draw attention to a particular section of text in the file and emailing the entire file to a desired recipient, but in the streaming media cases of interest to the present invention, where video and/or audio information is involved, all of the above options make significant data transfer demands on the networks in question. The demands are unnecessarily large when, as is often the case, the user only wishes to share a small portion of the item of media content as being particularly interesting, funny, relevant etc.
Services such as YouTube do allow users to attach a link to a chosen point in an item of streaming media and send the result to a recipient, so that the recipient is encouraged to begin playback at that chosen point, but even in these cases, the entire item is referenced, and the recipient may—at least in theory—have access to the entire stream.
However, one common problem with all current options concerns copyright and authorization issues. Take the case where the initial user is legitimately accessing the item of steaming media content, for example after having subscribed to a service authorized by the creator or owner of the content to permit access to preselected, typically paying users. Unless the user in question knows that all of the desired recipients also have permission to play the item in question, sending the item as an attachment, a link upload, or via “ripping” is likely to violate the terms of the user's agreement with the streaming service, if the transfer is even technically possible. However, there may be many cases where the owner of the streamed content is willing to allow a partial “sharing” i.e. the sharing of a short clip, which increases exposure and awareness of the item for the public but stops short of unfair intellectual property duplication or theft.
There is therefore a need for a method that allows a subscriber to a streaming media service to create a clip of an item of content, and share that clip, and that clip alone, with other people regardless of whether those other people are subscribers or otherwise authorized to access and stream the entire item. Ideally, such sharing would occur with minimal effort by the user, and involve minimal interruption of the streaming of the entire item of content to the authorized user.